How To Make Bootable USB for any Operating System Using Rufus

Installing Windows or other operating systems using CD/DVDs is old fashion. You can also install Operating systems on your PC using Bootable USB as most of today’s Motherboards support booting from USB drives. Now the question stands, “How to make bootable USB drive?” This article is the answer to this question. This tutorial shows, “how to make bootable USB drive for any operating system“. We will be using a small open source utility called Rufus for making bootable USB drive.

What we need:

USB Drive (size depends on Operating system, normally a 8GB drive works for all operating systems).

ISO file of the Operating system that you want to make bootable USB of.

How To Make Bootable USB for any Operating System Using Rufus?

Step 1

Insert your USB drive into your PC. Download Rufus from above given link. You don’t need to install it, it works without installation. Just double-click it. You will see an interface like this-

Step 2

First option you see is Device. Here you can select the USB drive which you want to make bootable. It will automatically show you USB drive name. You can select any other USB drive if you have inserted more than one USB drives into your PC. Leave other options intact, you can give New Name to your bootable USB drive in New Volume lable. Tick “Create a bootable disk using” option if not ticked already. Select “ISO image” and click on CD drive button.

A new window will pop-up. Select the ISO image of the operating system that you want to make bootable USB of, and click Open. I am taking example of Windows 8.1 64-bit ISO.

Step 3

After selecting ISO image, click on Start. It will show you a warning, “ALL DATA ON YOUR DEVICE WILL BE DESTROYED“. If you have any valuable data on the drive, first copy it somewhere else and then start this process again. If you don’t have any useful data on the USB drive, just click on OK.

Followed your instructions for making bootable usb using Rufus and my Gateway SX2110G Desktop still won’t boot from the usb and bios is set to boot from usb as 1st boot device. Any suggestion why I can’t get my PC to boot from the usb drive?